May/June 2026: Xiao Hai 小海
This month we are pleased to feature the poet and leading figure in the Picun migrant workers literature movement, Xiao Hai 小海.
Xiao Hai was born in 1987 in Shangqiu City, Henan Province. At fifteen he moved to Shenzhen to join the workforce and spent the next period of his life as a factory worker moving between cities, and writing over 500 poems. In addition to his poetry, Xiao Hai has just published a memoir of his life with Granta magazine. It began as an essay in Granta's special China issue (169), documenting his journey along the factory floors of southern China in the early 21st Century. The full memoir Adrift in the South (May 2026) charts a decade spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China’s fast-growing southern cities. In 2002, when Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. He spent the next decade dodging corrupt officials and abusive employers, working long hours in brutal conditions. The memoir reveals the workplace through the workers’ eyes: the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities that disclose the indifference of a larger system.
Publisher's Abstract
Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios. Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing.
This memoir is a landmark text from China’s migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world’s second-biggest economy.
The memoir is translated into English by Tony Hao.